Google has integrated geotagged YouTube videos into Google Earth. By selecting the “YouTube” layer in the “Featured Content” section section of Google Earth, you can see the locations of YouTube videos. Clicking on the icon allows you to play the video in Google Earth.
It is a great way to learn about a place.
As with geotagged pictures, the biggest challenge is the volume and variety of content. Even with the limited amount of geotagging happening today, major cities are blanketed with videos. The white markers in the screenshot above are a fraction of the geotagged videos. As you zoom in further, more appear.
They include videos of tourist sites, personal birthday parties, concerts, subway trains going by, etc. We’ll need ways to filter the firehose of content to what we’re interested in at the moment. Google Earth already does a great job of letting you pick among data sources; I suspect that in the near future the YouTube layer will be segmented by category.
Note: If you are reading this on the blog (instead of an RSS reader) you can roll over any of the links and watch the video right on this page.
Last night’s CNN/YouTube debate was a triumph of public participation in the political process. Although it served as a long promotional stunt for CNN (I saw breathless hyping of it on CNN 48 hours out), the format worked.
It’s tempting to say, let’s throw the journalists out of the process. Tempting, but wrong. The two dozen or so questions were selected by CNN from among almost 3,000 videos submitted on YouTube. The debate began with an explanation of how CNN selected the questions. No people in costumes. No using children to ask grown up questions. No stuffing the ballot box, as Joe Biden’s campaign tried to do with a question on the war. The most viewed question on YouTube — about whether Arnold Schwarchenegger is a cyborg — wasn’t put to the candidates.
As interesting as the questions were, most of the responses weren’t. Candidates, as in ordinary debates, often deflected the question and went straight to their talking points. I thought John Edwards did the best job of directly answering questions.
My biggest complaint about the format was the way the YouTube questions were shown. Instead of being shown full screen, they were shown as projected on a screen in the auditorium. When Mike Sharley was using flashcards to ask his question from a wheelchair, the camera cut away to a shot of Andersen Cooper staring at the screen. Even now, I can’t easily find all of the original questions that were selected. Here is my best guess at the Sharley video.
Here is my pick for the most entertaining question of the night:
A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.
The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.
In today’s Web world, they’re a terrible measure of user engagement. A user who spends 10 minutes watching a video or 15 minutes engaged in a flash game counts the same as a user who hit your site by accident from a search engine.
Even for non-multimedia experiences, chasing page views can create terrible user experiences. Consider some examples:
Splitting news stories onto separate pages. Each page of the story counts as a page view. Not only is the paging annoying to the user, it hurts the way your pages are indexed making it harder for people to find your content in search engines. It’s been a while since I worked in the news business, but I’d love to see what the drop offs are at each page.
Pointless confirmation pages. Many sites take you to confirmation pages just so they can count the additional page.
Popups/popunders/etc. I read a story while back about a publisher using popup- and popunder-ads to pump their page view numbers.
Ignoring page view metrics has created some great experiences:
Google Maps. If you drag the map around the screen, you count as one page view. But to the user this is much easier and a much better experience than the old model of clicking an arrow on the side of the screen and waiting for the page to refresh.
YouTube’s embedded videos. If they’d been chasing page views, they never would have allowed users to embed videos on their own blogs.
Yahoo’s streaming quotes. You don’t have to refresh the page to see the latest stock price.
Flash-based instant messaging. You can chat with your friends without having to download and install a special client.
Not only are they much better experiences, it can save the publisher money. It takes less bandwidth and processing power to send down just the updated information than it does to generate and send an entire page.
Nielsen’s time-on-site measurement is an improvement over page views, but as with any single measurement it can be gamed. The best managers will look at a range of metrics specific to their situation.
I’ve written before about the fragmentation of television. With cable and satellite, programmers can reach smaller and smaller audience segments. With content delivered over broadband, those segments become even smaller. Broadband distribution ultimately enables everyone to have his or her own channel.
People are already broadcasting their lives using Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other social networking tools. You can see their latest pictures, video and random thoughts.
That’s a fairly active process right now; you have to seek out the various social networks to consume that information. Incorporate these services into television and you can expand the reach. You’d be able to change to the “grandkids” channel, just as easily as you tune in to the Discovery Channel. I can imagine grandparents tuning their TVs to the all grandkids channel, featuring pictures and video of their own grandchildren. Of course, content within these virtual channels would also be available on demand.
There are a couple of services out there that approximate parts of this experience. One of my favorite flickr add ons is slickr. It downloads pictures from your flickr contacts and runs them in place of your Windows screensaver. It’s a fun, passive way to keep up with my friends are up to.
On the video side, TiVo has a relationship with One True Media that allows you to share videos with friends and family that play back on their TiVos.
Apple TV’s integration of YouTube doesn’t currently allow you to subscribe to a person’s videos, but I expect we’ll see that soon enough.
I got the YouTube software upgrade on my Apple TV today. As impressed as I was with Apple TV, the YouTube upgrade is a very welcome addition.
From the YouTube menu, you can watch featured videos, highest rated videos, most viewed and most recent. You can also log into you account and see your favorite videos.
The user interface and graphics of the YouTube implementation are as gorgeous as for the other features of Apple TV. The quality of the video varies dramatically based on the quality of the source content. It’s not HD, but some videos were as good as standard TV quality. After watching a video, you get a list of related videos.
The YouTube content available on Apple TV right now is thin. Of the 22 videos I have in my favorites, only 2 were available on Apple TV. The featured video list, however, largely reflects the videos featured on the YouTube homepage.
A search option is also available, though trying to type out keywords using the onscreen keyboard is more trouble than its worth. The search filters as you type providing a list of available videos, saving you some remote control torture if the video you’re looking for appears before you finish typing.
Upgrading the software was relatively painless, but I had to prompt my machine to check for the upgrade. It took about seven minutes total.
I encountered a few glitches: Some of the videos played back without audio. The on-screen keyboard wasn’t always responsive. The search implementation is a little odd; the number of results can go or up or down with each letter entered.
What’s missing? I’d like a way to create playlists for Apple TV from the Web. Right now there is no indication on YouTube.com of which videos are playable on Apple TV (or on mobile for that matter).
If Apple can bring flickr to Apple TV with a similar execution, I’ll be thrilled.
Now you can kill time watching YouTube videos anywhere, assuming you have a phone that can display streaming video. You should also have an unlimited data plan, lest you have to hold up a Brinks truck to pay your cell phone bill. Just go to http://m.youtube.com. (The link also works from a Web browser.)
The current version of the service is limited to selected videos. You can’t log into your account and show strangers videos of your kids or access your playlists. According to the FAQ, “We have a selected library of videos on the mobile website. We try to make the best videos from the website available on mobile, and we are working hard to add more content.”
The videos were intelligible on my Samsung A900, though noticeably worse than the same videos on the Web. The quality will suffice for killing a few minutes before a flight.
YouTube and CNN announced today debates with Democratic and Republican candidates for president. The debates will feature video questions uploaded to YouTube and will air on CNN this summer and fall. Audience questions have been featured in presidential debates before, but these are usually submitted in writing and read by a moderator or asked by an audience member in a “town hall” format.
Video adds another dimension: the questioners can use props and backgrounds to help illustrate their question. Although the questions will be screened for content and production values, it should be interesting to watch. I hope that all submitted videos will be available, not just the ones that are aired.
YouTube has already had a large effect on American politics. If it weren’t for his macaca moment, it’s very likely George Allen would have been re-elected to the U.S. Senate from Virginia, tipping the balance in the U.S. Senate. A gaffe that otherwise wouldn’t have made it on TV blew up in Allen’s face after being posted on YouTube.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has issued a guide for candidates (pdf) on how to make the most of Internet video. Among the guidelines: assume that you’re on camera all the time, record every public event of your own and send people to record video of your opponent.
The guide also emphasizes the importance of email, blogs and the Web in a section comparing the old vs. new ways of communicating messages to the public. Its conclusion: “Voters hear about issue/candidate/opponent through blog community, local newspaper, local news station, national media, email, website, etc.” (The Politico has a great analysis.)
Internet video allows candidates to get their precisely crafted, highly produced message to voters without being filtered by the mainstream media. But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the top videos aren’t those produced by the candidates.
An anti-Clinton “1984″ video, in which the New York senator is portrayed as a Big Brother-ish figure, accounted for about 75% of all traffic to candidate-related videos on YouTube in March, Nielsen found.
I bought an Apple TV over the weekend. It’s quite simply the most elegant, well-designed consumer electronics device I’ve used.
Apple TV works with iTunes to bring music, video, movies, photos and podcasts to life on your HDTV. (In geek terms, it’s a “digital media adapter.”)
You can virtually flip through your music collection and select what you want to listen to. Album art is shown on screen as the music plays. You can play unprotected music or music purchased through iTunes; music from competing services such as Rhapsody won’t work.
In the photos section, photos from your PC are rendered in high definition. The pictures are so vivid that I could watch them for hours. You can choose to have background music as the slideshow runs.
Apple TV also plays back audio and video podcasts, including some podcasts that are HD quality. This opens up a wide new range of content possibilities for your TV.
You can also watch TV shows and movies purchased from iTunes; I haven’t tried either of those.
The software is easy to understand and the graphics are gorgeous. The photo screensaver alone is almost worth the price of the box.
Unlike my new laptop, configuring it to work with my wireless network took just a few minutes.
A lot of companies have tried over the years to bridge the computer-to-PC divide and I’ve tried many of these products. This is the first one worth using. And this is just the first release.
Some of the things I’d like to see:
A better remote control. Apple TV comes with a very limited remote control. For content libraries with thousands of songs and photos, the remote is serviceable, but not ideal.
More Internet connectivity. You can watch movie trailers on Apple TV; you should be able to click to get showtimes. You should be able to share pictures with friends.
I’m excited about the possibilities for a device like Apple TV, but I may be one of the few. The signs so far aren’t good — I’ve seen pallets of Apple TVs sitting at Costco. In a recent speech, Steve Jobs referred to Apple TV as a “hobby”. There’s still hope, though: Jobs also announced upcoming support for playing videos from YouTube.
There was a big bike race outside my door yesterday. Thousands of people showed up to watch pro cyclists from around the world in the 100km CSC Invitational. What’s the best source to find out about what happened yesterday? Oddly, the answer is flickr.
Are the pictures as good as those of a Post photographer? Most aren’t, but some are. But it’s a moot question because the Post didn’t run any pictures from the event.
We’ve seen the power of flickr when it comes to big international events like the London Underground bombings. I can only imagine the flood of pictures that would have existed if flickr existed on September 11. I remember going to the “Here is New York” exhibition of pictures from amateur photographers in SoHo shortly after. The Web site offers a pre-flickr view of the impact of ordinary people photographing extraordinary events.
Flickr and other social media sites have strong potential to enable ordinary people to cover ordinary events; events that major media outlets don’t cover.
They aren’t there yet. In this case, you have to know that the CSC Invitational took place and go search for it. I would love to see a news view of flickr that would show me the most recent happenings in a given area. The building blocks are all there: tags, GeoRSS and geotagging.
NBC and News Corp announced a broad-reaching partnership this week that will feature shows from NBC and Fox on AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! — all the major Internet players except Google, the owner of YouTube.
Despite all the on-air promotion, people don’t go to the network Web sites. YouTube had 34.4 million unique visitors in February 2007, according to comScore. NBC sites had 6.8 million and Fox had 2.8 million. The combined reach of the 4 major networks is 17.9 million, about half of YouTube’s.
The press release claims that the distribution deal will let them reach 96% of Internet households. That’s an extremely optimistic figure, dependent on thoroughly penetrating each online network. Most internal products at companies like AOL and Yahoo! can’t fully penetrate their own network; it’s unlikely that a third party offering will. Still, it’s a huge boost.
The networks have many of the assets they need to deliver a compelling product — one much better than YouTube for copyrighted content. But I wouldn’t bet on it. And I wouldn’t hold my breath on NBC and News Corp. making the summer launch date.
Here is how I expect the final product to stack up against YouTube on six important dimensions:
Completeness - Tie
Timeliness - Tie
Quality - Networks
Usability - YouTube
Sharability - YouTube
Community - Possibly networks, likely YouTube
(details after the break)
Missing from the announcement was any tie up with Apple. Delivering high quality programs free to the recently released Apple TV could be a huge win. But the affiliates and cable companies won’t like that very much. And the Internet might grind to a halt. (more…)
